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Culture Shots: Funding deadlines, conductorless orchestras and how to get to the Electric Picnic for free

Laurence Mackin

IT’S MARCH, which means there’s a pile of funding deadlines approaching for Arts Council bursaries. On March 15th, applications close for Artist in the Community schemes and the Music Commissions award. Then March 29th is the final deadline for awards for Music, Opera, Street arts and spectacle, Film, Dance, Theatre, Arts participation, Traditional arts and Visual arts projects. Click here for more information. There’s still plenty of time to get in an application that could make an enormous difference and take a career or a project to a whole new level. So do it.

THE LATEST issue of the Dublin Review has some choice material, including a particularly intriguing story by Ed O’Loughlin on Albert Johnson, the “Mad Trapper of Rat River”, who in 1932 eluded capture from the Royal Canadian Mountain Police during a 150-mile chase before being shot and killed. You can access the issue over here (paid-for subscription).

CAN AN orchestra function without a conductor? What happens when you dabble in its dark arts? And who was the conductor who began an opera performance only to find that the cast had changed the show without telling him? This and more from Michael Dervan’s latest classical column over here.

Could you work for the type of people who produce this filth? You could? Excellent

THE GREAT Brown Bag Films recruitment drive continues apace. Now it is looking for computer animators. Click here for the necessaries. Still no overpaid vacancies for disgruntled hacks with poor social skills and coffee addictions, though. Rats.

FRIEND OF Jean-Paul Sartre, lover of Simone de Beauvoir, director of Shoah, French resistance fighter, Algerian revolutionary, and tear-gassed on the streets of Paris in May 1968 – Claude Lanzmann tells all (well, okay, a lot) in this cracking interview with Ed Vuillamy. I defy you not to buy his autobiography after reading this article. Utterly engrossing.

FOR THOSE of you planning to go to the Electric Picnic, but don’t have the cash upfront, you can avail of its instalment plan here. Or, if you want to go for free, you could work there as a volunteer. Here are the details. I know several people who volunteered last year, got the jobs at the last minute, and really enjoyed the experience. Incidentally all campervan and family tickets are already sold out.

AND TO mark the fact that LulzSec allegedly had a few Irish members, why not generate your own hacker name? Like all good things on the internet this seems brilliant for precisely 15 seconds and then you move on to something else, possibly cat-related. Click here. We’re timing you.